Answer

Why Does the Proclamation Tie Chastity to Calamities?

Paragraph 8 of the Proclamation is the one that makes people uneasy. Tying personal sexual choices to calamities on nations sounds like an overstatement, or like a threat.

It is neither. It is a claim about cause and effect. Chastity protects the two things families are built out of — the creation of children, and the bond between the two people raising them. When the sexual bond is separated from commitment, children arrive without both parents, marriages form and dissolve faster, and the costs land on the people least able to carry them.

Eternal Truths

Intimacy does two things, and both are enormous. It can create a body for one of Heavenly Father’s children, and it forms a powerful physical, emotional and spiritual bond between a husband and wife. Both are what chastity is protecting, and neither is trivial enough to leave unguarded.

The warning is about aggregation. The Family: A Proclamation to the World warns that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets. That is not a prediction of fire from the sky. Individual choices about chastity add up into what a society looks like in a generation: how many children grow up with both parents, how stable marriages are, how much of the burden falls elsewhere.

The antidote is the same thing. If the breakdown comes from separating intimacy from covenant, then chastity — kept before marriage and within it — is not merely a restriction. It is the repair. That is the quietly hopeful part of the paragraph and it is usually skipped.

What Can Make This Confusing?

The word “calamity” sounds apocalyptic, and the effect it describes is the opposite: slow, cumulative, and unlabelled when it arrives. That is the hardest kind of consequence to see coming and the easiest to dismiss while it is happening. It is also easy to hear the paragraph as a judgement on individuals, when the sentence is about a direction of travel.

Questions to Think About

• Do I read this paragraph as a threat or as a description of consequences?
• Where have I seen the costs of family breakdown land on someone who did not choose it?
• What would it mean to treat chastity as repair rather than as restriction?

What You Can Do

Read paragraphs 7 and 8 together this week and notice that the second is the consequence of the first rather than a separate topic. The essay behind this answer sets out what the demographic research has found since 1995.

Jesus Christ is rebuilding families one covenant at a time, and He starts with the one you are able to keep.